The European Court compels companies to inform their employees if they are monitoring their e-mail accounts ...

                    

The European Court of Human Rights ruled on Tuesday in a landmark case of privacy and acknowledged that companies should tell employees in advance if their e-mail accounts are monitored.

In a case in which a man was released 10 years ago to use a work correspondence account to communicate with his family. The judges found that the Romanian courts had failed to protect the correspondence of Bogdan Barbolescu because his operator had not given him prior notice that he was monitoring his contacts.

The company had given him copies of his own letters to his brother and fiance on Yahoo Messenger as evidence of a breach of the company's ban on such personal use.

Barbolescu had earlier told his operator that he had only used the service for professional purposes.

The Court concluded that Barbolescu had not been informed in advance of the extent and nature of the employer's monitoring or the possibility of his access to the contents of his communications.